RE: FrameMaker or InDesign CS

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Matt,

Was my name used in vain again? (No, in San Jose perhaps?)

None of this is "official Adobe policy" to use your wording.
Adobe really doesn't have anything like that. The following
is strictly "Dov" ...

Quite frankly, I don't use Microsoft Word for anything unless I
absolutely must, such as updating something that someone else
produced but that I am not going to have any long term responsibility
for. It is too unreliable, at least for me. Gross printer-to-printer
and version-to-version formatting relayout, lousy typography, and 
program crashes of that program obviate its use except for rare
situations. One of those rare situations is when I need to throw
together some text in Hebrew or a mixture of English and Hebrew.
The international character set support of Microsoft Office is to
me its only real strong suit!

Personally, I would obviously love a program that was effectively
InDesign with the features that FrameMaker has that InDesign is
missing. I would add to that full support for all international
character set input methods supported by Microsoft Windows 2000/XP
in combination with Office XP.

Back to reality for the time being.

If you need support for numbering, footnotes, variables, structure,
OLE linkages, etc., the current (2.0.2) and to-be-released version
(CS = 3) of InDesign just won't cut it!

Otherwise, at least for me, InDesign is where I do my major work.
The typographical features and quality is to die for! It natively
supports the full Adobe imaging model as well as Unicode and OpenType
fonts. It has the most robust native PDF export with live transparency,
layers (CS), color management, both RGB and CMYK-based colorspaces, etc.
It provides state-of-the-art vector graphics tools that are a major
subset of what is provided for by Adobe Illustrator. And with the 
current and to-be-released version, individual documents of hundreds
of pages are not at all a problem. The only downside is that all this
functionality does have a very heavy processor and memory threshhold.
Anything less than a 800 mhz Pentium 3 with a half gigabyte of memory
is pretty much out of the question for serious use of InDesign. I 
absolutely don't understand your "short document life" thing ... 
... what's that about?

        - Dov

At 10/2/2003 09:45 AM, Matt Sullivan wrote:
>I'm sure Dov will be happy to expound on some of the official Adobe policy,
>but as I've always seen it, there are 3 types of DTP apps, each excellent
>tools for specific needs:
>
>1)Simple Docs - Under 50 pages, no book structure (MS Word)
>2)Books/Tech Pubs - Numbering issues, chapters, generated TOC/IX (obviously
>Frame)
>3)"Desktop Publishing" - Short document life, need for rapid layout changes
>and customized (overridden) styles and page layouts (InDesign)
>
>As Graeme Forbes pointed out, ID has some great typographical features. In
>fact, I had a (former) typesetter in a class who said InDesign's type
>features gave her an automatic 95% of what she could have achieved on her
>(previous) typesetting equipment. High praise indeed from a type pro.
>
>ID also has some great workflow features. Native .ai (Illustrator) and .psd
>(Photoshop) files can be placed directly in ID. They also can be viewed at
>the same level of quality, and through the same color engine as Photoshop
>and Illustrator. Translation: You can zoom in on a .ai or .psd and it looks
>identical in color and quality to the native application's representation of
>it.
>
>ID and FM have very in-depth interfaces, though, a potential drawback when
>using something like InDesign infrequently. I probably forgot more about how
>to move around ID with text frames in the first 6 months, than I ever knew
>about many applications. Once you're past that curve, however, you'll never
>think about QuarkXpress or PageMaker (or, gasp!, MS Publisher) again. (note
>conspicuous lack of reference to Simple Doc and Book Publishing programs, as
>they do not address the same needs as ID, QXP and PM)
>
>-Matt
>
>Matt Sullivan
>GRAFIX Training, Inc.
>1094 Cudahy Place, 102
>San Diego, CA 92110


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